This Hack Lets You Use Google for Real-Time Search

Think you're already a black belt in Google-Fu? Get ready to kick it up a notch with a real-time search hack that will have you round-housing the web with more precise searches.

Google already gives you a bit of fine-tune control by allowing you to limit search results by time frame, but you can only choose between 'Any time,' 'Past year,' 'Past week,' 'Recent results,' and 'Past 24 hours.' That means if you want to search for articles that were crawled just minutes ago -- or even a second ago -- it's Twitter or bust. Until now.

Omgili blog discovered that if you change a specific parameter in the URL, you can have Google display search results for the past minute or second. The parameter in question is qdr.d, which the blog surmises stands for Query Date Range (we won't argue). Let's take a look at an example:

The above URL spits out search results for Intel that were posted within the last 24 hours, but if we wanted to narrow down further, we could search for results posted in the last few minutes by changing the qdr:d string to qdr:n, and for the past second, we'd change it to qdr:s.

It's not too often that the 'Second' search will come in handy, but if you wanted to expand it a bit to the past 30 seconds, you'd change the parameter to qdr:s30. You can do the same with minutes, just enter a number afterward.

Comments

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So we can adjust the query string to look at what happened 30 seconds ago. BFD. That doesn't mean that news will get to us 30 seconds after it happens. It still has to be reported and then fed into Google's search system, which in the case of ordinary web pages and blogs means waiting for Google to crawl to the web page and index it and include it in the search, and then rank it and blah blah blah. This is probably why Google hasn't made the query hack more prominent knowledge... it exposes more limitations in Google's search methodology than it offers as enhancements. Some news sites which are either crawled more frequently or which have a direct feed into Google News might show up in results, but to think that adjusting the query string is going to get you searching the web quicker is just silly... and for anyone to assert that's what the query string is doing.... to me that sounds like Maximum BS.